The POCO X8 Pro Max brings the best power and battery life!!
The POCO X series is one of the best picks in the mid-range and premium mid-range smartphone segments, bridging the gap between the affordable POCO M series and the flagship F series, which primarily focuses on performance. But this time around, POCO has changed a few things with its new X-series, introducing two offerings in its eighth generation: the POCO X8 Pro and the POCO X8 Pro Max.
Until now, the POCO X series smartphones were the ones that were priced on par with the mid-range and premium mid-range segments, and now the prices of both the POCO X8 Pro and the POCO X8 Pro Max are on the higher side, with the POCO X8 Pro Max being their flagship offering in the X-series. The POCO X8 Pro Max comes with a great set of specifications, but it comes with a hefty price tag, which is close to budget flagships out there.
Last year's POCO X7 Pro was a solid offering with a good set of specifications where performance was the top priority, and here it is no different. However, with the POCO X8 series, there are a lot of expectations, and right here with the POCO X8 Pro Max, it is difficult for it to sustain them, since the budget flagship segment has a lot of offerings from different brands out there. So, is the POCO X8 Pro Max worth considering, and how does it fare against the competition?
Let's find out in the full review.
POCO X8 Pro Max Design:
In terms of build and design, the POCO X8 Pro Max has a simple and subtle look that can be clearly seen on the back, with no flashy design as such. The back has a smooth matte finish, and the build is of fibreglass instead of proper glass, which would have been more premium. The POCO X8 Pro is available in three different colours - Black, White, and Blue. The White colour option is not purely white; instead, it looks like a satin silver finish on the back with a few stripes running from top to bottom.
The other two colours are solid colours with no stripes running through them or any kind of flashy stuff out there. The smartphone is flat on both the front and the back, and the edges are rounded, making it easy to hold in the hands. The back of all three colour variants does not carry many fingerprints or smudges as such. The POCO X8 Pro Max gets an IP66+IP68+IP69+IP69K rating, which makes it dust- and water-resistant, thus providing strong durability.
The camera module is pill-shaped, like we saw on the POCO F7 (Review), and this camera module houses the dual cameras, with the two LED flashlights placed outside the camera module beside it. The camera module has an interesting addition of LED rings around both cameras. They are two RGB LED rings that have four segments, and you can tweak them with different colours for lighting, but do note that the two LED rings light up with the same colour, and you cannot customise a different colour for each LED ring.
The LED rings provide multiple functionalities, like lighting up when any messages, calls or notifications come up and acting as a colour-coded charging indicator while charging. For example, when the battery is charging from 0 to 20 per cent, the LED ring lights up in red colour; orangish-yellow when charging is between 20 per cent and 50 per cent, then turns white above 50 per cent and green when fully charged at 100 per cent.
Even while playing music from any third-party application like Spotify or YouTube Music, both LED rings light up, and while playing games like Call of Duty Mobile or BGMI, the colours light up simultaneously. In terms of weight distribution, the POCO X8 Pro Max weighs around 218 grams, which is slightly on the heavier side, but due to the fibreglass construction at the back, it does not feel that heavy, despite having a massive 9000mAh battery.
Around the sides, the thickness is around 8.2mm, and there is a premium aluminium frame that houses the power button along with volume buttons, whereas the left side remains completely clean. At the top, there is a secondary noise-cancelling microphone along with a speaker grille for stereo output. At the bottom, there is a primary microphone, a loudspeaker grille, a dual SIM card slot and a USB Type-C port. There is neither support for a microSD card slot for storage expansion nor a 3.5mm headphone jack.
On the front, the display of the smartphone has a single punch-hole in the display located on the top centre, which houses the selfie camera. The bezels are not the slimmest around the sides, but they still look good. Overall, the design looks good, and so is the build, but a proper glass back would have made it slightly more premium. However, the durability is good with a proper IP rating.
POCO X8 Pro Max Display:
The POCO X8 Pro Max sports a larger 6.83-inch 1.5K (1280x2772 pixels) AMOLED display with a screen-to-body ratio of 19.5:9. This is a 12-bit display, which means colours look saturated with deeper blues and blacks, with excellent viewing angles. The display has support for a 120Hz refresh rate, and this is an LTPS panel and not an LTPO panel, which is slightly disappointing as it's priced closer to budget flagships out there.
Talking about the refresh rate, under settings there are two options to choose from: Default and Custom. If you set the display to Default mode, the refresh rate switches automatically depending on the content on the display. For example, while watching a 60fps video, the display refreshes at 60Hz and then switches to 30Hz, 90Hz, and 120Hz, with 120Hz only while playing heavy games. While the display is idle, the refresh rate is set to 60Hz.
If you set the display to Custom mode, you can set your application-specific refresh rates, and most of them can easily achieve a 120Hz refresh rate; otherwise, the standard 60Hz is a better option for extended battery life. Combined with the 120Hz refresh rate, you get a 480Hz touch sampling rate for faster touch responses, and there is 3180Hz PWM dimming, thus preventing strain on the eyes while viewing the display in the dark.
The display also provides an instantaneous touch sampling rate of 2560Hz while playing games. In terms of display brightness, the POCO X8 Pro Max reached a peak of 3500 nits and around 2000 nits in High Brightness Mode, which are good figures. Under direct sunlight, the brightness reached around 800-900 nits, and in very low light or darkness, the display could drop to as low as 2 nits, thus not straining the eyes.
In terms of colour profiles, there are three different profiles to choose from: Original Colour Pro, Vivid, and Custom. Choosing the Original Colour Pro mode provides more natural, well-balanced, and calibrated tones, whereas Vivid mode provides punchier and saturated colours. Custom mode lets you customise the colour temperature to a warmer or a cooler tone accordingly. The display of the POCO X8 Pro Max has support for HDR, so you can watch HDR content on YouTube.
There is also support for Widevine L1, so you can easily stream HDR content on OTT platforms like Netflix, Hotstar, etc. and on top of that, there is support for Dolby Vision, so you can easily watch any of your favourite content, thus providing an immersive experience. In terms of display protection, there is Corning Gorilla Glass 7i, which is decent enough for a display. The display gets an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner, which is reliable and quite fast in daily use.
POCO X8 Pro Max Performance:
The POCO X8 Pro Max is powered by the flagship MediaTek Dimensity 9500s chipset, which provides almost flagship-level performance and is very close when compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 on the OnePlus 15R (Review). The MediaTek Dimensity 9500s has an octa-core configuration which consists of 1x3.73 GHz Cortex-X925 core, 3x3.3 GHz Cortex-X4 cores and another 4x2.4 GHz Cortex-A720 cores based on an efficient 3nm process. Coupled with the chipset is the powerful Immortalis -G925 MC12 GPU.
In terms of daily tasks, whether it is scrolling through webpages, playing games, taking photos and videos using the camera, etc., the smartphone handles all these tasks with ease without breaking a sweat. When it comes to gaming, all heavy games like Genshin Impact, Call of Duty Mobile, BGMI, etc. can be played easily at the highest graphics settings. The 120Hz refresh rate also makes the gaming experience better.
In BGMI, the smartphone easily achieved Smooth graphics with Ultra Extreme frame rates, with very minor frame drops noticed. Gameplay ran smoothly, and 120fps was maintained most of the time consistently since POCO has focused on gaming here. With Genshin Impact, the gameplay was smooth at the highest graphics, but at times there were minor frame drops noticed, and the smartphone easily achieved around 90-100fps during gameplay.
POCO's Wildboost is an intelligent software optimisation tool built into Game Turbo, which is an advanced software -hardware gaming enhancement tool which predicts per-frame computing loads to proactively prevent frame drops and optimise power efficiency during heavy gaming sessions. It also maintains the frame rate. In terms of network connectivity, you get good carrier aggregation and support for almost all bands of 5G.
After longer hours of gaming, i.e., 3-4 hours continuously, the back of the smartphone did feel slightly warmer, but the fibreglass build and the larger 3D IceLoop Cooling system, with a larger 5800 mm2 liquid cooling area, do help dissipate heat faster. In a CPU throttling test, the smartphone could achieve a sustained performance of around 70-75 per cent with very minimal throttling present. The benchmark scores were good and closer to those of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset.
The POCO X8 Pro Max is available in two variants: 12GB LPDDR5X Ultra RAM with 256/512GB storage having UFS 4.1 speeds.
POCO X8 Pro Max Software:
The POCO X8 Pro Max runs on the latest Xiaomi's latest HyperOS 3 platform, built on top of Android 16 out of the box. Compared to previous iterations of HyperOS on Xiaomi or POCO smartphones, the user interface remains identical, with some new changes and the addition of AI features. There is a newer set of animations and transitions in the user interface. You get a lot of customisations where you can change icon shape, size, colour and also fonts.
Just like Apple's Dynamic Island, Xiaomi's Super Island is present, which provides multiple functionalities like showing the timer, incoming calls, and any music playing on Spotify, and quick shortcuts to running applications in the background, all of which are in a compact form factor around the front camera. All system-wide icons have a newer look with a slight redesign. The notification panel is seen when swiping from the top right, whereas swiping from the top left shows the quick settings.
Other than this, with HyperOS 3, there is a lot of focus towards AI-drien features, which has been one of the biggest trends for every smartphone user interface. AI Dynamic Wallpapers and Cinematic Lock Screens convert any still photo into an animated and motion-rich wallpaper using cloud-based AI processing. AI Speech Recognition helps to reduce background noise and hear voices clearly during playback. It provides real-time transcription while watching videos and creates summaries from meetings.
AI Search scans local files, app data settings, audio recordings and PDFs, thus providing smart summaries. It has an enhanced Gallery Search where it utilises natural language prompts and visual tags to locate specific images across various categories. AI Interpreter and AI Subtitles provide bilingual translation and simultaneous interpretation for phone calls, and live on-screen subtitles in up to 25 languages while watching videos.
You can also tap the smartphone to another Android or iOS device to easily share photos, videos, and files. You can also pair with a Windows PC or laptop, where you can seamlessly use the smartphone content on the laptop or PC. However, with HyperOS 3, there is a huge number of pre-installed applications, which make the experience slightly cumbersome, and Xiaomi's own set of applications can only be disabled and not uninstalled, which lets it down slightly.
In terms of software updates, the smartphone will receive another four years of Android OS updates and six years of security updates, which is very good, as both brands are also offering this software update policy.
POCO X8 Pro Max Cameras:
The POCO X8 Pro Max sports a triple-camera setup that includes a 50MP f/1.5 Light Fusion 600 sensor for the primary camera and an 8MP f/2.2 ultrawide camera. On the front, there is a 20MP f/2.2 OmniVision OV20B sensor for selfies.
In terms of images taken from the primary camera during the day, the details look sharper, with a wider dynamic range and less noise in the background. The colours look natural without much oversharpening in the background. The contrast is good, and the white balance is handled well. These images are captured by default at 12MP. Using the dedicated 50MP mode results in sharper details with good dynamic range and less noise in the background. However, there is some oversharpening present.
At night, the images from the primary camera come out with sharper details and have a wider dynamic range with less noise in the background. The details in shadows are well balanced, and there is no such scene of overexposure in the background. The colours look natural but tend to be oversharpened a bit. The contrast looks good, and the white balance is handled well. When it comes to 2x zoomed images taken during the day, the details look sharper with good dynamic range, but with some noise around.
Similarly, at night, the 2x zoomed images come out with sharper details and have a wider dynamic range, with some noise around the corners. There is some oversharpening in the background. The images taken during the daylight come out with sharper details, good dynamic range, and less noise in the background. There is some distortion around the edges, with some oversharpening present. The colours look natural and do have a warmer tone.
At night, the images from the ultrawide camera come out with softer details and have a decent dynamic range, with more noise in the background. The colours look natural, with some oversharpening in the background. The ultrawide camera also doubles as a macro camera, producing images with slightly softer details and washed-out colours, with noise in the background. The primary camera provides some very good portraits with proper edge detection and background blur.
The human skin tones look natural without any kind of over-sharpening in the background. The dynamic range is wider, and white balance is handled very well in portraits. In terms of selfies, the 20MP front camera does a good job in terms of details, which look sharper and have a good dynamic range. Skin tones look natural, though the background shows some oversharpening. The noise is on the lower side, though.
However, in low-light scenarios, the front camera does struggle in terms of light, as there is higher noise in the background and oversharpening is present. In terms of videos, the primary camera can record 4K videos at 60fps, whereas the ultrawide camera can record 1080p videos at 30fps. The front camera can record 1080p videos at 60fps. The videos from the primary camera come out with sharper details and a wider dynamic range, with less noise in the background. The colours look natural without any kind of oversharpening.
For a noise-free experience, you can switch to 1080p video recording at 30fps, where the ShootSteady mode kicks in, thus reducing noise to a greater extent. The presence of OIS works well at night in reducing the noise to a greater extent, thus providing sharper details and a wider dynamic range in the videos. The 2x zoomed videos come out with sharper details and good dynamic range, with some oversharpening in the background.
The noise is less, though. The videos from the ultrawide camera during the day come out with sharper details and decent dynamic range. However, the noise is slightly on the higher side. At night, the details in videos have softer details, with heavy oversharpening in the background. On the front, the 1080p videos come out with sharper details and have a wider dynamic range with less noise in the background. The skin tones look natural with some sharpening present.
POCO X8 Pro Max Battery Life:
The POCO X8 Pro Max sports a massive 9000mAh battery, which is the highest-capacity battery for any POCO smartphone to date. With the efficient MediaTek Dimensity 9500s chipset built on a 3nm process and HyperOS 3 on board, we do expect a healthier battery life, and the smartphone does not disappoint in this area.
With normal usage that includes streaming social media, scrolling through webpages, and other lighter tasks, the smartphone easily lasted for two to close to three days on most occasions, thus providing a solid battery life. The standard screen-on time came around 10-11 hours, which is excellent. With heavy usage, which includes playing heavy games continuously for 4-5 hours, rendering videos, clicking images and taking videos, etc., the smartphone easily lasted for one and a half days with some charge left.
The standard screen-on time came around 6.5-7 hours with heavy usage, considering the larger battery underneath. In terms of charging, the smartphone has support for a 100W fast charger, which comes inside the box, and it takes the smartphone from 0 to 100 per cent in around 1 hour 10 minutes, which is quite fast considering the larger 9000mAh battery.
There is no support for wireless charging, which may not be a concern for most in this price segment, but you do get 27W reverse wired charging, using which you can use the POCO X8 Pro Max as a power bank to charge other smartphones using the charging cable.
POCO X8 Pro Max Audio Quality:
The POCO X8 Pro Max sports a dual stereo speaker which has an enriching sound experience, and the sound does not feel muffled or distorted even at the highest volume settings. There is also support for Dolby Atmos, which provides a great experience while watching videos, listening to music, etc. For a lossless audio experience through earphones, there is support for LHDC and LDAC support.
Verdict:
The POCO X8 Pro Max provides a solid, flagship-level experience when it comes to its specifications for the price segment. The build and design are good, with the fibreglass back and durability; the AMOLED display is great for multimedia consumption, and to enhance it further, the stereo speakers are present. In terms of gaming and performance, the chipset provides an almost flagship-grade experience; the larger 9000mAh battery with faster charging aids it further.
The software experience is good, with HyperOS providing a host of AI features that come in handy for daily usage. Even the software update lifecycle has been improved on POCO smartphones, which is reflected here also. However, there are some compromises clearly seen on the smartphone. Though you get a good build and design, the presence of a proper glass build is missing, and the display protection is not the best.
The MediaTek chipset provides a flagship gaming experience, but the back of the smartphone does feel slightly warmer. In terms of cameras, POCO has clearly cut corners, as the primary camera performance is decent but not the best when you compare it with other smartphones in the budget flagship segment that have better cameras. The ultrawide camera struggles in terms of low-light in terms of images and videos. There is also no telephoto camera present, considering the price segment.
HyperOS 3 provides a good, feature-rich software experience but still lacks finesse and is not as smooth as other user interfaces like OxygenOS or OneUI due to the huge bloatware that comes pre-installed on the smartphone, which is not expected from a smartphone in the budget flagship segment. When compared to the competition out there, you do get a solid smartphone with the right specifications, except for the cameras; other smartphones do offer better cameras.
When you compare the MediaTek chipset with a Qualcomm chipset found on most budget flagships from iQOO, OnePlus, etc, the performance and gaming experience are almost on par, so there would not be much of a difference. With time, MediaTek chipsets have seen a drastic improvement from quite a longer time also. So if you are someone who wants a performance-centric smartphone with the best battery life and future-proof specifications, thus sacrificing the optics, then the POCO X8 Pro Max is a solid buy out there, making it worth considering.